Just three more days to go for my 'Attacking with HTML5' talk at BlackHat Abu Dhabi. In addition to covering some of the interesting HTML5 attacks already released during 2010 by myself and other researchers, it has two new sections - HTML5 based port scanning and HTML5 Botnets. I would be talking about a new way to perform JavaScript based port scans that gives very accurate results. How accurate? you can determine if the remote port is open/closed/filtered - that accurate. I am also going to release a tool....more

Well it's been a while since I have blogged. Been quite busy with work lately. Also I guess Lava is better at blogging stuff so I'll leave that to him :)

After my talk at BH EU earlier this year, there has been quite a lot of other really cool stuff been published on penetration testing of JAVA Thick/Smart clients. Check out Javasnoop especially. It has some pretty good features you would like to use. Many people that I spoke to recently said to me that modifying objects programatically using the IRB shell in DSer would be difficult and it would require the penetration tester to have indepth knowledge of the application's source code. Well; in the first place, penetration testing is a skill and it does require hard work, so understanding the application's internals is part and parcel of the job. But that being said DSer allows you to play around with JAVA objects using an interactive shell with some helper methods and is completely extensible. It was meant to be a template, to add your own stuff and extend it's capabilities......more

Matt Austin made a brilliant discovery sometime back and wrote a detailed post of his hack, you absolutely must read it. Basically it is a problem with sites that use Ajax to fetch pages mentioned in the URL after # and then include them in the innerHTML in a DIV element, he picks 'touch.facebook.com' as an example.

Quoting from his post

If you click on any URL you see the links don't actually change the page but loads them with ajax. http://touch.facebook.com/#profile.php actually loads http://touch.facebook.com/profile.php into a div on the page.

The problem here is that the XMLHttpRequest object can make Cross Origin calls thanks to HTML5. So if a victim clicks on a link like 'http://touch.facebook.com/#http://attacker.site/evil.php' then 'http://attacker.site/evil.php' is fetched and is included in the innerHTML of the page leading to XSS.....more

Couple of weeks back Jeremiah Grossman posted details of his (Safari Auto-Complete hack - http://jeremiahgrossman.blogspot.com/2010/07/i-know-who-your-name-where-you-work-and.html) along with a really cool (POC - http://ha.ckers.org/weird/safari_autofill.html). To me the most interesting aspect of the POC is how it populates the text box with JavaScript, simulating the victim’s keystrokes.

I ran the POC in Google Chrome and as each character was entered in to the Input box, there was a list of auto-complete suggestions that popped-up. The amount of information that was in those lists was scary. Jeremiah’s POC was not designed to capture the information in the auto-complete suggestion lists, it was only looking for values that got populated in to the textbox......more

If you claim that "XSS is not a big deal" that means you never owned something by using it and that's your problem not XSS's

-Ferruh Mavituna, Author of XSS Shell, XSS Tunnel and NetSparker

Cross-site Scripting is an interesting vulnerability. It is relatively easier to discover in a Penetration test but demonstrating its impact has always been tricky. So tricky in fact that it has pushed one of the most creative groups of people in IT (Penetration testers) in to using the most boring and misleading POC possible. Yes, you guessed it right, the ubiquitous JavaScript alert() box. To break the monotonousness testers sometimes change the message being displayed but that’s as far as it usually goes. It also has the nasty side effect of developers blocking the word ‘alert?in their code while ‘eval?is let through.....more

Google Chrome, Safari, Firefox and Opera(Beta) have implemented the HTML5 Offline Application Cache feature. Using this feature a website can have greater control over the caching process to enable Offline access of websites.

When a website is trying to create an Offline Application Cache, Firefox and Opera ask for user permission and only after the user permitting, the site is able to create this cache. With Google Chrome and Safari this step is skipped, any website can create an Application Cache without the user even knowing about it....more

HTML5 is increasingly getting more attention from the developer community as it brings features that most developers would have never used before. Client-side storage with Web SQL Database, Offline Storage, Cross Origin Requests, Offline Application Cache, Cross Origin Messaging are some of these features that are going to have developers drooling over the next few years at the thought of all the cool things they could do.

With all these new possibilities we are going to have many new types of vulnerabilities and attacks. Security has been a prime consideration in the design of the HTML5 spec ....more

JAVA Object Serialization has been in use in many applications for a long time now. I find many enterprise applications that make use of JAVA Object Serialization to transfer objects from the client to sever and vice-versa. Testing such applications is a pain as it is not as straight forward as normal web applications that make use of simple parameter and value in HTTP POST data.

Some applications g-zip the serialized data before transferring it. Most common protocol for such applications is HTTP and RMI. There aren’t many easy techniques available today to test such applications and even if they do, they have certain shortcomings. At BlackHat EU this year, I discussed a technique that could be used to test such applications ....more

A few days back I got a link to the RubyHero website, it lets you nominate a person of your choice for the Ruby Hero award. I wanted to nominate Manish because he is doing some pretty cool stuff with Ruby and also always ferociously defends Ruby in our Perl vs Ruby arguments. So there I was, on their homepage typing in the Attack and Defense Labs URL in to the input box. But as I typed it in, the URL started showing up inside the ‘Nominate?button. Since it looked like a candidate for XSS I entered ?lt;h1>?and sure enough it was rendered by the browser, tried the script tag and got an alert command to execute.

None of this is even remotely amusing but what is interesting is how this XSS vulnerability can be exploited. The payload in this case can neither be injected through any URL or POST parameter like a reflected or stored XSS nor be injected through any DOM object before the page loads like discussed in popular references of DOM based XSS attacks. It can only be injected by the victim himself by typing out every single character of the payload!! ....more

Hey guys, this year Black Hat Europe is happening at Barcelona, Spain and I will be presenting there for the first time. The topic that I'm speaking on is "Attacking JAVA Serialized Communication". You can read the abstract here. There is an interesting aspect behind this topic. To give you a short background, I usually conduct trainings on Secure Code Development for JAVA developers and Security Testing for QA testers. During one of the lectures, while I was explaining parameter tampering on web applications using interception proxies, one of the developers asked me how I can accomplish the same on thick clients which normally transfer data as serialized object.....more

This idea occurred to me a few weeks back when discussing the potential impact of ClickJacking attacks with Luca. Submitting forms using ClickJacking is hard work and is only successful in very rare scenarios. The Twitter ClickJacking attack was one famous instance where form submission was involved, but it was a form that was submitted over ‘GET?request.

In this post I will discuss a technique that can be used to bypassing any CSRF counter measures and submit POST method -based forms with attacker controlled data using ClickJacking. This works on JSP applications and partially on ASP.NET applications......more

This is it folks! Finally Imposter is available for download. I have put up a short tutorial on how to use it along with some videos of the attacks.

I am also releasing two white papers:Flash+IE=Prison Break ?Explains the File Stealing attack against Internet Explorer in detail.Google Gears for Attackers ?Explains the different browser phishing attacks that can be performed against user of Google Gears.

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